Discipline of Sociology & Criminology Seminar Series:

Invisible and Erasable: Doing Race and Gender beyond Colour

Speaker: Sohoon Yi 

Join via Zoom: Email Leah Williams Veazey for link and more information: leah.williamsveazey@sydney.edu.au

This paper is informed by the study of racialisation from point of view of decolonisation and people of colour by considering historicity and relationality as a tool to understand race rather than colour. In doing so, this paper explores invisible and erasable forms of racialisation hidden from view in the campaign against racial discrimination surrounding the case of Ku Sujin, a naturalised marriage migrant woman from Uzbekistan in South Korea. Ku was rejected from entering the public sauna because of her foreign appearance and her experience became national headlines in 2011. The paper considers the racialisation(s) of two groups of migrant women beyond her case: marriage migrants who are expected to reproduce “indistinguishable” biracial children and migrant entertainment workers in the area where the sauna was located. By placing gender at the centre of analysis, I investigate the significance of blood lineage in the conceptualisation of race and women’s body as the reproducer of Korean race by reviewing historical connections to Japanese colonialism and American militarism. I argue that the imaginations of migrant entertainment workers and marriage migrants are constructed at the intersection of racialisation and sexualisation. In doing so, the essay provides an alternative view of racialisation that, owing to a complicated history of colonisation, goes beyond the politics of colour and is interactive, plural, and relational.

Sohoon Yi is Assistant Professor in Sociology at Kyungpook National University (until August 2023) and in Global Korean Studies at Korea University (from September 2023). Her research interests include migrant subjectivity at the intersection of gender, immigration laws, precarious labour, and the informal market. She has worked with various activist and community groups including KOWHY (a community organisation for young temporary Korean migrants) in Australia. She has published articles in various academic journals including Citizenship Studies, Social Politics, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Sohoon completed her PhD in 2018 at The University of Sydney, where she was supervised by Nicola Piper and Sonja van Wichelen.